As a result of a copyright infringement lawsuit between Google and Viacom,

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

This decision appears to affect You Tube watchers world-wide. Google raised privacy issues with the court, to no avail:

[I]t said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were "speculative".

Google isn't blameless in this latest threat to our privacy. [More...]

Original Post: 7/2/08

Bush to Consider Closing Guantanamo

ABC News reports that President Bush is holding talks about the future of Guantanamo and may decide to close it.

As TalkLeft noted here and here, Ronnie White's death in a jail cell, within a day of his arrest for running over a police officer, is more than suspicious. Under the circumstances, this editorial in The Washington Post is spot on:

IT IS UNSURPRISING but still infuriating that Prince George's County correctional officers have refused to cooperate with investigators looking into the death of inmate Ronnie L. White. These officers, who swore to serve the cause of justice, are preventing investigators from uncovering the circumstances of the death of Mr. White, who was strangled, according to a preliminary autopsy report.

The questions awaiting an answer are many: [more ...]

If you thought racial profiling was on the way out, think again:

The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.

.... Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told The Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.

Among the factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

Like Jeralyn, mcjoan has a good analysis of the just released Al Haramein v. Bush opinion by Judge Vaughn Walker of the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The NYTimes has the news points. But mcjoan makes a great point about the significance of the opinion to the current Dem capitulation on FISA:

[T]his opinion should shame a Democratic Congress which has been absolutely negligent in its duty of oversight over the executive. [ . . ]

Sen. Barack Obama today wrote a letter to stating he opposed a ban on gay marriage.

In a letter to San Francisco's Alice B. Toklas Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, the presumptive presidential nominee said he opposed "the divisive and discriminatory efforts to amend the California Constitution" and similar efforts in other states.

Good on Obama. He's not afraid to change his mind.

Obama is skating gingerly past his previous position on the issue.

The Illinois senator has said repeatedly that he believes marriage should be only between man and a woman. When the California Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage in May, Obama released a carefully nuanced statement saying he respected the court's decision, believed states should make their own decisions on marriage and "will continue to fight for civil unions as president."

We're behind Obama on this one, all the way.

A federal judge in California Wednesday ruled that Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance runs afoul of FISA:

“Congress appears clearly to have intended to — and did — establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted,” the judge wrote. “Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

Judge Walker’s voice carries extra weight because all the lawsuits involving telephone companies that took part in the N.S.A. program have been consolidated and are being heard in his court.

The opinion is here (pdf). [More...]

15 hostages, including 3 Americans have been rescued from FARC in Colombia.

French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt, three US nationals and 11 other hostages were rescued from Marxist FARC rebels Wednesday, freed from years in captivity by a daring Colombian military raid.

Betancourt, who was captured in 2002, and the three Americans held since 2003, were rescued along with 11 Colombian soldiers in dramatic fashion when the Colombian military infiltrated a rebel jungle camp and removed them by helicopter.

A plane carrying the Americans, Defense Department Contractors, is about to land in Texas.

Sen. John McCain was in Colombia today and said he was told about the rescue while there. He said it was a coincidence.

Via NPR, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the court's first African American Justice, would have turned 100 today.

Check out this clip -- billed as a "lost interview" between Marshall and Mike Wallace. Though it's undated, Marshall talks about Adam Clayton Powell's controversial support of Republican president Dwight Eisenhower and the Democratic Party's failure to act on segregation in the South.

Our thanks are due to the ACLU and the EFF for their tireless efforts to safeguard our privacy in the age of electronic information. As technology changes, the government finds new ways to circumvent the Fourth Amendment. These organizations do their best to stay on top of the government's intrusion into our electronic lives.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) to the Justice Department seeking information about the government's warrantless tracking of cell phone locations.

The ACLU filed the FOIA request in November following media reports that federal officials were using Americans' cellular phones to pinpoint their locations without a warrant or any court oversight, the groups said. Some government officials at the time said they did not need probable cause to obtain tracking information from mobile phones. In addition, the reports said some federal law enforcement agents had obtained tracking data from wireless carriers without any court oversight.

The Justice Department declined the request. The ACLU and the EFF responded by filing suit (pdf) to compel the disclosure.

So now we know, McCain is soft on Communism:

Sen. John McCain has denied the allegation made by Sen. Thad Cochran that he grabbed a Sandinista by the shirt collar in a confrontation that reportedly happened 21 years ago. Sen. Thad Cochran told the story to the Sun Herald this week, saying McCain grabbed an associate of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and pulled him from a chair during a 1987 diplomatic mission.

I am snarking, for those who do not get it.

By Big Tent Democrat, speaking for me only

The only chance, imo, McCain has to win this election is to go nasty, via third parties if possible, on Barack Obama. Eric Boehlert reports on one of the planned assaults:

The notorious [Swift Boaters'] group also remains a hot topic because the same publisher of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat book, Regnery Publishing, is planning to release an August book on Sen. Barack Obama called, The Case Against Barack Obama. The book's roll-out will be pushed by the same well-connected conservative public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, that was behind the Swift Boat blitz. Conservatives hope to catch lightning in a bottle again and derail the Democratic nominee with the release of this sensational book, but in order to disrupt Obama, the publisher will have to do more than lob all sorts of wild accusations. It will have to enlist the help of the Beltway media.

(Emphasis supplied.) After using the Beltway Media to whine about General Clark, McCain has boxed himself in on the necessary dirty attacks that he would need to be made on Barack Obama for McCain to win in November. And for what? For three days of early July coverage? More . . .